COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF USERS PERCEPTION FOR ROAD CONCESSIONING AND TOLLING USING MULTINOMIAL REGRESSION AND ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORK

Abstract

Roads, a predominant means of transportation in developing countries like Nigeria have suffered neglect and are in deplorable conditions due to inadequate funding by the government. However, road concessioning have not been widely accepted in Nigeria due to limited understanding by road users. The 49.5 km Lekki-Epe Road (LER) and 1.36 km Lekki-Ikoyi cable-stayed Link Bridge (LILB) concession road were selected for detailed study. Closed and open ended questionnaires were administered to road users and analyzed. The study findings show that majority of the road users are civil servants, non-resident in the study area and are high-end users of the roads. Also, home based trip purpose, use of personal vehicles, preference for paying the toll fees in cash regardless of the discounts offered on E-Tags was observed among the respondents. Consequently, majority of the road users complained of non-availability of alternative routes, being overtaxed especially when having to use the roads multiple times in a day. The use of fuel tax in financing highway construction and maintenance, and that neither new nor existing highways should be tolled also constitute feedbacks from road users. The study recommends that other options of road infrastructure financing such as the Build, Operate and Transfer should also be considered, and the tolling concessioning period needs to be properly defined. Also, multimodal systems of transportation should also be enhanced in developing countries to alleviate the stress imposed on road pavements that thereby hastens their deterioration.